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Friday, January 27, 2012

I Just Feel Like Ranting

Life... has not been good for me so far since the start of 2012. Maybe it's the feeling knowing that the world is gonna end soon but yeah, there's no sort of flowery and great experiences nor great moment of motivations for me since the beginning of the year, despite how much I want it to be so.

Watch out, the place where you're sitting on will probably be under water sometime this year

I've been spending quite a lot of time in the virtual world of games, to be honest. Despite how much protest my brain puts in and how much it tries to convince me that it is not real, somehow I just could not find the strength to really put gaming aside.

I guess it's the feeling of escapism that the game offers that I find it really hard to live without. In a game, you could be anyone you want and you could do anything you want to do without being judged. Even if there's other players, the contact you have is much less severe than real life contact which you can just simply shrug them off because you won't be seeing them often anyway. Besides, you also get the sense of importance in game too. It's this kind of feeling that makes it hard for me to like gaming so much.

Whereas in life, one cannot help but feel that it is something like a constant rat race. Since coming to university, life has always been trying to do better than the other person all the time. The work never stops. One must constantly try to improve yourself or risk losing out your life chances to another person. Be it in studies, dance or even blogging, you must be one of the best or you are not considered good enough. There's no opportunities for the second place.

It reminds of how my father used to compare life with a cycling competition. All of us are like cyclists vying for the championship in real life. The finishing line is sort of what we would describe as success in life, perhaps a dream job or an A grade in exams and everyone of us are competing against each other to reach the finishing line first. And to do so, we must ensure that we pedal harder and faster than the rest of the cyclists or else they would reach the finishing line first. If we choose to rest halfway in the competition, other people would overtake us and that wouldn't be a good thing because then they would be winning the competition.

I never liked the analogy though, as legitimate as it sounds, because it feels to me like life is like a never ending cycle of well, cycling. Because success is relative in life and one could never be perfectly successful, there's no way we could ever reach the finishing line and say that I'm done for life. No. Life is nothing but a constant race to the finish, a constant competition with the 6 billion other people who share the same planet with you to reach that imaginary finish line. That's how the term rat race came about too. Unless you die early of course.

Which is why lately I have been feeling less of motivated to accomplish even the simplest task in my life and would prefer gaming instead. I know that somehow I'm using too much of this as an excuse and it is not healthy in the long run, but I couldn't help but feel tired sometimes of trying to cycle so hard to reach this certain finishing line called success in life. For starters, there's no definite absolute value that you can say it's success in life. You can try and try for the rest of your life but you can never be too sure where the ending point is because you can just keep going and going.

Secondly, if you are doing everything for the sake of reaching the finishing line, sometimes it gets pretty pointless too. Like sitting in the library 3 hours per day everyday just to memorize all the facts of your studies and forsaking everything else. Life is not just all about this though.

Writing all these makes me think back to the Three Idiots movie. Of how some of us are so pre-occupied with chasing the so called "success" in our life that we are forcing ourselves to do things that we do not like. Sure, you might end up with loads of money and a well paying job but by the end of the day, all of that looks pretty hollow.

I for one believe that doing what you like and living life out according to your own rules is much more meaningful that just blindly chasing after what others are chasing. Sure, you might not earn as much and might not have big houses and stuff, but at least you are happy. And being happy and having a purpose means so much more to me. And like the Baba Chandran said in Three Idiots, as long as you follow what you want, success will come chasing you, pants down.